Logout to login ratio 0.5

Some of my smarter coworkers added several interesting features in the SimpleSAMLphp statistics module. And the numbers show that if the users are presented with a log out option, half of the users prefer to use this option to closing their browsers. This trend has stayed stable during summer, when the number of logins have fluctuated wildly.

The graph shows an initial fluttering as the functionality was tested, then support was gradually added in more services. The large jump from .2 to .5 and above comes as several large scale services migrated to the new interface.

Logout to login ratio

In my earlier posting Single Logout grows I pointed to this trend and wrote about the implementation. A good user interface has proven to be alpha and omega, as shown in Andreas Solberg’s implementation.

I wish Shibboleth would add support for logging out, as the feature is wanted by half the users. Not to mention all the vendors and software houses that have told us that logout is neither requested nor possible to do in a useful way. Our users are voting with their clicks on this issue!